Dionysius the Areopagite

(1) Psrupo- Arroraaira. Under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite there has passed current a body of remarkable writings, which it will be the object of the present article to discuss. But before entering on the main question, whether the author of these writings was the Dionysius converted by St. Paul (Acts xvii, 34), it will be convenient to clear the ground by discriminating each of them from a third Dionvsius, the St. Denys of France, The identity of all three, as is well known, was a matter of popular belief for many centuries ; and even at this day it is maintained by some writers, with as much zeal, if not as much acrimony, as the possession of the true relics of Dionysius was once contested between the monks of St. Denys and those of St. Emmeran of Ratisbon.

Was, then, the convert of St. Paul at Athens the first apostle of France? The answer would not seem doubtful from the following considerations :—(1) The antecedent improbability that a bishop of Athens, as Eusebius declares the Areopagite to have been, should be afterwards sent on a missionary journey into Gaul. (2) The fact that, when Dionysius of Corinth is writing to the Athenians, and citing the example of his namesake, their first pastor, he makes no allusion to his mission to that country, or his mar- tyrdom there. (8) The statement of Sulpitius Severus, that the earliest martyrs for the faith in Gaul were to be found under the reign of Aurelius ("ac tum primum intra Gallias martyria visa," Sacr. Hist. ii. 46), i.e. after A.D. 160. (4) The circumstance that neither the old martyrologies, nor the old French chroniclers, con- tain any hint of the identity of the two. Gregory of Tours (Jfist. Franc. i. 30) fixes the coming of St. Denys into France as late as the reign of Decius, or subsequent to A.D. 250; while Usuardus, who wrote his Muartyrologium for Charlemagne, shews the opinion prevalent in his own time, by assigning one day (Oct. 3) to the memory of the Areopagite, and another (Oct. 9) to that of the patron saint of France. Nor is it any objection to this that, in the Roman missal, the passage from Acts xvii. relating to the Areopagite is appointed as the lesson for the latter festival, as though this implied a recognition of the identity of the two. For the same reasoning, applied to the Festival of the Assumption, from which the gospel is taken from St. Luke x. 38-. 42, would of course imply the identity of Mary of Bethany with the Virgin Mary. In short, before the compilation of abbat Hilduin's Arco-

pagitica, n the reign of Louis le Débonnaire (A.D. 8/4-840), the identification of the two seems to have been almost undreamt of. From that period indeed the notion was eagerly aczepted by French ecclesiastics, as flattering to national vanity; and Abelard, himself a monk of St. Denys, narrowly escaped with his life for opposing the popular theory. The 17th century, a century that witnessed the challenging of so many accepted traditions, was prolific in writers on both sides of this question ; and it is interesting to learn that it was the very last which occupied the mind of Pascal. A dissertation on the subject has been found in manuscript among his papers (quoted by V'abbé Darras, in the work cited below, p. xiii. n.), in which he lays down the principles that ought to guide all such discussions. Yet, even to the present hour, the associations of Montmartre and St. Denys seem to bias the judgment of Pascal's countrymen ; and the conclusion of one of them respecting Dionysius, which deserves to be quoted for its epigrammatic point, may be taken as a representative of many:—'"Neé dans Athénes, Lutéce d'Orient, il meurt 4 Lutéce, Athénes d'Occident ; successivement époux de deux Eglises, dont |'une possédera son berceau, et l'autre, sa tombe. Montmartre vaudra la colline de Mars." (L'abbé Dulac, inf. cit. p. 13.)

[Dionysius (1)].